A Norwegian born in Africa? Studied at the Sorbonne, Heidelberg, Oxford, and Harvard, then returned to the U.S. to teach Lutherans of their own confessional tradition? Every step he took was a battle? Sounds very unlikely. But that is the nutshell story of Carl Braaten.

Why would such a person cause so much grief to moderate to liberal bishops for decades? Braaten himself tells the story in a memoir entitled Because of Christ. The title is fitting, but the book could have been called "The 50-Year Struggle of Protestant Theology Through My Eyes."

Among American Lutheran theologians, none have been more lively and important than Carl E. Braaten. For a personal window into the history of 20th-century theology, I know of no better place to start than this book. It reads like a combat journal of dozens of battles in theological reasoning. It is written by a courageous and plain-spoken man with a brilliant theological mind, a man who has lived through most of these skirmishes personally, and in many cases affected their outcomes.

I know of no one in American theology who has fought harder than Carl Braaten, and made as much difference as he has in navigating these stormy shoals, always with good judgment and candor and deep rootage in classic Christian teaching, especially as viewed with Lutheran eyes.

And I must confess that I know of no one in American theology whom I personally have found battling at my side, through so many skirmishes and for so many essential confessional loci, as Carl Braaten. He has fought mainly in the Lutheran vineyard and I in the Wesleyan, but we have throughout learned steadily from each, seldom differing and always benefitting from our occasional times together. So this will not be an ordinary academic review of an academic book, but a grateful review of the import of his whole body of work.

There have been several such intellectual autobiographies written by theologians in recent years, but none more penetrating and incisive in describing whole panorama of tough issues of contemporary theology. Braaten seems to have been always in the right place at the right time to obtain special insider information about crucial turns of contemporary theology: the death of God, demythology, the series of quests for the historical Jesus, the hermeneutics and history debate, etc. Always candid, sometimes acerbic, but continuously perceptive and caring, Braaten has not hesitated to enter the fray if the integrity of classic ecumenical teaching is at stake. The cheers of orthodox believers and writers the world over are called for.

The title of Braaten's memoir comes from Luther's phrase, was Christum treibt (what conveys Christ—propter Christum), rendered in English as Because of Christ. The theologian has the vocation of "contending for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints." Those solemnly charged with the teaching office are called "to judge doctrine and reject doctrine that is contrary to the Gospel." This is what Braaten has had the courage to do during his long and productive life. His writings are listed in an extensive bibliography appended to this memoir: more than a dozen major theological books (from Harper, Westminster, Eerdmans, Fortress, and Augsburg), and many dozens of articles and chapters, along with a plethora of hard-hitting editorials in his journals, dialog and Pro Ecclesia. Braaten made a special contribution by editing thematic collections of essays by major authors on themes such as Neo-Paganism, Catholicity, the Finnish breakthrough in Luther research, Mary, Eschatology, God-Talk, and Re-evangelizing the Postmodern World. Unpacking the stories and underlying dynamics of these arguments and events is the central feature of this memoir, told in an engaging and straightforward way, without pulling punches.

Braaten was born in multicultural Madagascar, where traditional African animism prevailed. He was the son of orthodox Norwegian Lutheran missionary parents. His first chapter tells of his first sixteen years (1939-1946) in that remote place, learning in a two room schoolhouse, going to a boarding school where no dating was permitted, wearing long pants for the first time at his confirmation, and playing tennis until there were no more replacements for gut strings (he remained an avid lifelong tennis player, gradually shifting toward golf in his Phoenix retirement years). Many years later, amid the clamor over multiculturalism in America, he would remember "what a gift it was for children of foreign missionaries to have acquired a global multicultural perspective in a perfectly natural way."

From his early days in America in Lutheran schools (Augustana Academy and St. Olaf College) and then on to the Lutheran seminary, Braaten was an avid student. This prepared him to go on a Fulbright to the University of Paris--Sorbonne, where his primary interest was in Sartre. He then returned to Harvard to study with Tillich, and serve as his assistant.

Just as Braaten wrote his Harvard dissertation in Heidelberg under Tillich's direction (on Martin KÄhler's epochal book The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic-Biblical Christ), so did I go to Heidelberg to work further on refinement of my Yale dissertation, looking toward finishing my books on Bultmann and Barth. There were so many parallel experiences in our lives—too many to enumerate.

Braaten edited Tillich's A History of Christian Thought. He was among the first to confront the strengths and limitations of Bultmannian teaching. He was an early participant in the Pannenberg Circle. He was among early Lutheran dogmaticians to describe and analyze and critique the New Hermeneutic. He was in the thick of the battle throughout almost every major Lutheran debate of the past fifty years.

Braaten details his experiences among his Lutheran brothers and sisters. These are amply recorded in the flood of editorials he wrote over his long and fruitful life. His years at the Lutheran School of Theology, Maywood Campus, and Oxford's Mansfield College are thoroughly described in his memoir. Then came his exceedingly productive years at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (1968-1991), where there were some crucial victories but also many heartaches. With Robert W. Jenson, Braaten authored two volumes of Christian Dogmatics that will be read by serious readers for many years to come. It was in these years that he and Jenson edited and wrote robustly in dialogue: A Journal of Theology. He and his wife LaVonne were ever active in speaking and writing on behalf of good health and good food.

A major turn occurred in 1991, when Braaten formed the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology and began to publish Pro Ecclesia, the successor to dialog. I was privileged to have been in on the early conversations on the formation of the Center. I was at that time working in the United Methodist Church renewal efforts in parallel with Braaten's work with Lutheran issues. I managed to get him to come for an interview at Drew University, hoping he might join me there to become my close colleague in theology, but Drew was having enough trouble handling me, much less Carl Braaten in tandem with me, and Braaten could see that he would not be in his element at Drew.

Just as I would remain committed to the renewal of the United Methodist Church from within the church, so did Braaten remain committed to the Lutheran tradition and its interpretation while leading ground-breaking dialogues with major figures of both evangelical and Catholic theology. The list of "Center Books" published by Eerdmans—20 volumes over ten years of magnificent work—is truly a remarkable achievement. As Carl nurtured the Center, I was engaged in my corollary work of producing the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. Note that these two great publishing projects were done not by the mainline publishing houses of the Lutherans and Methodists (Augsburg Fortress and Abingdon) but by traditionally evangelical publishers: Eerdmans and IVP. In both cases the foundation was classic consensual ecumenical Christianity. Thanks, Carl, for your magnificent memoir.

Thomas C. Oden is Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Theology and Ethics Emeritus at the Theological School and the Graduate School of Drew University. The author of many works of theology, he is the general editor of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (InterVarsity Press).

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